Making Sense of the World with Words

As some of you know, I like to write pieces of satire from time to time, especially when I get frustrated. It’s a laughing-to-keep-from-crying thing. For the past four years, one of these has appeared in the April Fool’s edition of the Et Cetera, Regent’s weekly paper. For your reading enjoyment, here is the brief (just under 300 words) one that appeared this year:

Religious Right Finds Copy of Constitution in Monastery

Conservative US Christians have long maintained that the United States Constitution is a document based on biblical principles. Now, it seems, they have proof.
Last week, archaeologists excavating the ruins of an ancient monastery in Upper Egypt found a nearly complete copy of the founding document of the United States of America, until now universally thought to have been written in Philadelphia in 1787. It appears to have originally been written as a “rule,” or a governing document for a monastery or order of monks.
“This is a tremendous find,” gushed Constantine Cash, president of the political lobbying group Council on Family Worship. “Now, maybe people will realize that America was founded as a Christian nation, and we’ll be able to tear down that pesky wall between church and state.”
However, the claim that what we now know as the Constitution was written in the 3rd-5th centuries by a group of monks is not likely to go uncontested.
Archaeologist Morton Prinsterer, for example, is skeptical of this new find. “In the first place,” he says, “this document is written in English. In the second, it looks like a copy of the Constitution that you can buy in museums and archives, with a few words crossed out.” The change of “We the People,” the first words of the document, to “We the Monks” was, in Prinsterer’s opinion, not the work of an ancient writer.
“Nonsense,” responded Cash. “It’s obvious that the Founding Fathers took this document and used it to create a Protestant Christian country, then put it back exactly the way they found it. Why is that so hard for people to believe?”